As an OTT (Over The Top) service develops rapidly, a mobile operator is faced with a dilemma of an increase in traffic but without an increase in revenue, and needs to seek a new revenue source to keep a stable revenue growth. Network capability opening is an attempt of the operator for an additional revenue source. The operator hopes to open network capabilities to third-party applications, thereby enhancing service experience of the third-party applications and implementing a new business model. The opening of network capabilities is classified into opening of query capabilities and opening of control capabilities. Query capabilities include acquiring context information, cell load and the like of a user, and control capabilities include setting quality of service (QoS) required for a service and the like.
An existing radio pipeline capability opening architecture mainly includes an application server, a capability opening gateway, a wireless core network device, and a radio access network device. A capability opening application programming interface (API) may be provided for the application server by using the capability opening gateway so that the application server acquires capability information on a radio network or controls the radio network. Specific functions of the foregoing components are as follows:
The capability opening gateway completes third-party authentication, acquires capabilities of the radio network, performs convergence and orchestration, and provides an abstraction capability for an API opening and management platform.
The API opening and management platform performs policy control and policy authorization, and is connected to the capability opening gateway to implement opening of a radio pipeline capability.
The wireless core network device includes a mobility management entity (MME), a serving gateway (S-GW), and a packet data network gateway (P-GW) in a long term evolution (LTE) system architecture, and includes a support GPRS serving node (SGSN) and a gateway GPRS support node (GGSN) in a universal mobile telecommunication system (UMTS) architecture. The wireless core network device is configured to enhance the GGSN/P-GW, send policy information on a UE and a cell to the capability opening gateway, and control an access network.
The radio access network device refers to an evolved base station (eNB or e-NodeB) in an LTE network, refers to a radio network controller (RNC) in a UMTS network, and refers to a base station control device (BSC) in a global system for mobile communications (GSM) system, and is configured to send context information and a cell state of a user to the capability opening gateway.
However, in the existing radio pipeline capability opening architecture, the capability opening gateway needs to establish interfaces with multiple radio access network devices and multiple wireless core network devices, and needs to perform convergence processing on different types of capability information. With continuous network expansion, there is a need to continuously update the capability opening gateway, and the capability opening gateway needs to process an increasing amount of information and becomes more complicated, which hinders network deployment and increases implementation difficulties. In addition, the capability opening gateway needs to implement control over users and cells by using a wireless core network device, which involves many interaction activities and leaves much room for improvement in its control speed and control effect, and user experience is to be improved.